Писательница создала роман о мире, где время движется в обратную сторону

Six years ago, Chloe Benjamin, author of the New York Times bestseller “The Immortalists,” was hunting for inspiration for her next work of fiction. “The Immortalists” had been published to critical acclaim in 2018. After completing that project, Benjamin spent years working on a novel that she would eventually set aside. It “wasn’t the right book,” she said. Then, Benjamin read about the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, an experiment at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station. Run by a multi-university collaborative and funded by NASA, the array of radio antennas suspended from a stratospheric balloon was devised to study neutrinos – fast-traveling elementary particles with no electrical charge. Around that time, ANITA had captured some unusual data that intrigued the scientific community: neutrinos that seemed to be moving in an inverted direction. Physicists began positing theories, including one idea straight out of science fiction: that these unusual neutrinos were evidence of a mirror universe parallel to ours, but where time moves backwards. “In the CPT-symmetric universe model, the Big Bang created two universes: the one we know, and a second, mirror universe where properties like time are inverted,” Benjamin explained. “That was soon disproven as an explanation for the ANITA results, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It really captured me.” That scientific spark led Benjamin to the “right” book: “Under Story,” out Sept. 1 from Putnam. Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more A personal tragedy drives Laurel Salter, a scientist who studies fungi, to escape her ordinary life and take a job in Antarctica as a kitchen steward at the McMurdo Station. Once there, she encounters a mysterious and inexplicable light source called the “Arc.” Scientists from across the globe arrive in Antarctica to study the phenomenon; one of those is Eli, a renowned physicist and Laurel’s ex-husband. Laurel knows the Arc is more than it seems from the surface of the ice. When she convinces Eli to help her test a long-shot theory, they soon discover a world beyond their wildest theories – a universe that might lead them backwards to what they lost. A love letter to the sciences from physics to biology, “Under Story” explores grief, love and connection to our planet and to each other. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q. Science, especially physics, is tough to tackle. How did you go about researching the concepts and incorporating them into the story? As a writer, I love books that offer me a new world to think about, and psychologically live in. So I took the real science as far as I could before I started to embellish or change things. While I was inspired by the idea of reversed time in a CPT-symmetric universe, I knew that I would want to fictionalize that universe pretty drastically for the purposes of the story. The theory itself doesn’t go into something as granular as biological aging, but the idea of life moving in reverse led me to fungi. I thought about how they decompose life in our world and how they might compose life in a world that moved backward. That meant I knew pretty early that fungi and physics would be two of the major threads. I shadowed scientists in Minnesota studying fungi, such as a University of Minnesota researcher named Robert Blanchette who specializes in rhizomorphs – that was a great trip. I attended a women’s mushroom conference in Wisconsin and a psychedelic conference, which inspired one of the book’s settings. There were a lot of adventures along the way. I am very aware of and fearful about climate change. It’s really visible and tangible in a place like Antarctica. I think I felt a sense of responsibility in writing about that element. And as I was researching Antarctica, I was lucky to have some amazing sources teach me about what it was like to live and work at the McMurdo Station. The McMurdo base itself was such an appealing place to set a book – it’s kind of like academia in its way, a subculture. People come from all over, taking odd jobs in order to have this experience of living at the bottom of the world. It’s a collection of eccentrics, free spirits, people who are figuring something out. I thought that social community was really interesting. This week’s bestsellers at Southern California’s independent bookstores Q. Can you talk a little about what it was like to build out a universe that reverses time – and aging? What I hope to do with this book is to show just how wondrous and strange real life can be. Although the concepts in the book feel very science-fictional and alien to our way of thinking, they’re just a mirror of the way that life already is. For instance, I think it’s totally wild that we are born from a human body and then we decompose – all I did was reverse it. Still, it was a huge challenge to write. I had a spreadsheet that I used to track the forwards and backwards life cycles for animals, plants and fungi. Plants were especially difficult to figure out with turning pollination around. Then I had to think through things like, people are now composing in the earth; how are they being connected with family members? I worked on the book for so long – it took about five years to get to a first draft – that I had a lot of time to get accustomed to a reverse world. And even though it was this continual brain teaser, I actually started to think that way. By the end of the project, I had to remind myself that July comes after June, and summer follows spring because I had been thinking in terms of the novel for so long. Q. The secondary characters were interesting to me. In the afterword, you wrote that the character Gloria, Laurel’s academic mentor, was inspired by your grandmother – were there any others? The character Maisie has parallels with a childhood best friend of mine. I did not realize that when I was writing it. After my friend read the book, she asked, “Is Maisie me?” And we both sort of realized it at the same moment. But I don’t usually pluck people from life and put them in as wholesale as I did with Gloria. That was a very unusual choice, and I think it came from the fact that my grandmother died shortly before I began writing the book, and so Gloria was a way of processing that loss and trying to preserve her essence. Q. In the afterword, you said that you changed some of your own habits in the process of writing the book. I’ve always been a compassionate person towards other people, but I started feeling so deeply for other forms of life. I stopped eating meat. I mean, I loved pork, but it just started to feel sort of emotionally untenable. It was a very unexpected part of this process. I am a city kid by birth; I grew up in San Francisco. As I was writing this book, I was entering into a closer relationship with the natural world for the first time. I was inspired by a real-life orchard in Wisconsin, Door Creek Orchard, when creating the place where Laurel grew up, and I was able to connect very early with the owners and founders. They were wonderful in doing interviews and helping me to see parts of their process. I even attended a sheep shearing. Overall, I was amazed by what I learned about other organisms, from the role that worms play in soil health to the fact that plants communicate through scent. There are all of these ingenious, diverse ways that life has developed, and it made me feel a lot of humility as a human being and a lot of awe for other forms of life. Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026 Q. You also said you hope readers feel inspired to fight for the protection of our world and its inhabitants. If through this book, I can inspire people to care about some of these things, or to feel some of the awe and wonder and respect that I came away with, then that feels like a way of doing good in the world right now. Chloe Benjamin in conversation with Jordan Moblo When: 7 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 2 Where: Book Soup, 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Tickets and information: https://booksoup.com/event/2026-09-02/ticketed-store-event-chloe-benjamin-conversation-jordan-moblo-discusses-signs